People Development and Programmes Director

David O'Connor

David joined Common Purpose in 2011, having relocated to the UK from Ireland. He began his career with Common Purpose as a Programme Manager in our London team. David has worked across a wide variety of Common Purpose projects such as open programmes, international development initiatives, student offerings and customized solutions.

David pioneered our work with Online Learning through a partnership with FutureLearn in 2014 to develop our first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). This broke FutureLearn records for audience participation and introduced experiential learning to what was quite an academic approach. He subsequently brought this in-house, building on the Moodle LMS platform to ensure that all Common Purpose programmes are blended learning designs, taking our experiential approach and translating it to social learning on line. In his role as People Development and Programmes Director for Common Purpose Charitable Trust, David leads on programme quality & design, blended learning and people development.

David is an experienced facilitator, having worked in the private, public and voluntary sectors. Prior to joining Common Purpose, David worked in the telecommunications industry, specializing in sales and internal training delivery. He has also previously worked in consultancy, and with various Chambers of Commerce in Ireland as a relationship & project manager and training facilitator. David holds a BBS (Hons) in Business & Marketing from the University of Limerick, Ireland.